Interview Daniel Birnbaum is a contributing editor of Artforum and the author of several books on art and philosophy, including The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology(1998) and, with the artist Carsten Höller, Production (2000). From 1998-2000 Birnbaum was the Director of IASPIS, an artists-in-residence programme based in Stockholm. Since 2001 he is Director of Portikus and the Städelschule Art Academy, Frankfurt. Birnbaum is a regular contributor to such art journals as frieze and Parkett. Survey Madeleine Grynsztejn is Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She curated the 1999/2000 Carnegie International (Pittsburgh), and has held curatorial positions at The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Born in Lima, Peru, Grynsztejn has written extensively on contemporary artists, among them Kiki Smith, Jeff Wall and Christopher Wool. Focus Michael Speaks is Director of the Metropolitan Research and Design Postgraduate Program at the Southern Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles. Speaks has published widely in journals such as Domus, Metropolis and Architectural Record, where he is a contributing editor. Speaks serves on the advisory boards of A+U, Archis and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Artist's Choice Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher whose ideas encompassed metaphysics, science, psychology, aesthetics, ethics and religion. Chair of the Collège de France (1900-21), Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Artist's Writings Olafur Eliasson is a sculptor, photographer and installation artist whose works explore the relationship between nature and technology, individual experience and collective space. Eliasson draws together in his work art, architecture and science; the artist explains the simultaneous experience of these disciplines in an open letter, published here for the first time, addressed to a viewer moving through one of his large installations. He will represent Denmark in their Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
